the Complexion Connexion

I contribute a piece today on interactive services that enrich the in-game and everywhere sports-fan experience ...

Chris Slagter, a principal of Equakecreative, the interactive branding
house responsible for the Suns locker room, says: "All sports are about
three years behind. They could be doing a lot more interactive and
driving more e-commerce."

Separately today, Venrock venture capitalist, Richard Moran, adds a thought-piece on the binding force of IT in the organization ...

A former President of Stanford once told me: "The only thing that holds the university together is the heating system." The bon mot always gets a knowing chuckle, especially from other college presidents.

The nice girl at the bakery this morning commented on my salmon colored newspaper, and I wondered what the story was.

To Wikipedia ...

The FT was launched as the London Financial Guide on January 9, 1888, by Horatio Bottomley, renaming itself the Financial Times on February 13
of the same year. Describing itself as the friend of "The Honest
Financier and the Respectable Broker", it was initially published as a
four page journal from its headquarters in London. The initial
readership was the financial community of the City of London. The Financial Times
soon established itself as the sober but reliable "stockbroker's Bible"
or alternatively "parish magazine of the City", with its only rival
being the slightly older and more daring Financial News. In 1893, the FT
turned salmon pink—although later credited as a marketing masterstroke
that made it immediately distinguishable from its competitor, the
similarly named Financial News[citation needed] In 1993, the (founded 1884) this move was in truth inspired by economy—pink paper being cheaper than white.FT
printed a single edition of the paper on white stock to commemorate
this change a hundred years earlier. From their initial rivalry, the
two papers were merged by Brendan Bracken in 1945 to form a single six-page newspaper. The Financial Times brought with it a higher circulation, while the Financial News provided enormous editorial talent.

Take KPMG, the management consultancy, for example, or the Royal Bank
of Scotland, or data storage giant EMC – all three have held careers
fairs in Second Life, the online “virtual world”. And in a recent
survey of IT recruiters by the Association of Technology Staffing
Companies (ATSCo), 58 per cent said that social networking sites such
as LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace are more useful for recruitment than
print advertisements. Eighty-three per cent, meanwhile, said they used
those sites to trawl for potential job candidates.

“You want to turn the business rules into compensation. With a
centralised book, you can cascade strategic changes in the call plan,”
says Leslie Stretch, senior vice-president of global sales, marketing
and on-demand business at Callidus Software. The implications penetrate
to the bottom line.

Samantha Hanson, vice president of human resources at Vurv, says:
“Previously, every time I’ve done a restructuring, the chief financial
officer has his spreadsheets, human resources have theirs and legal are
looking at another. They’re not looking at the same thing.

There's a reason The Economist is your favorite read (after People). It oozes substance but manages through adherence to a long English/Scottish tradition of self-effacement to undercut any possible hint of self-importance. Its authority comes sentence by sentence in its Voice; and while making sense of complex and serious matters it makes light of itself and reminds the reader to attain that same healthy perspective.

The early July cover is a fine case in point. It had this picture, below, accompanied by the intriguing line, "The trouble with private equity"...

"The Trouble with Private Equity"

A great number of people in the past decade have become (more) wealthy through hedge funds and what are called "Private Equity" investment vehicles -- through managing them as well as investing in them. Whole urban real estate markets have been inflated by the sheer volume of cash flowing out of the private equity space. (It's one reason I've moved the family out of NYC).

This makes criticism of Private Equity in a venue like The Economist a bit of a sticky wicket -- readership is populated by either private equity moguls or apologists. That's why this light-hearted cover image is so strong. It begs the question, with a soft aesthetic touch, marks the presence of something like RISK(?) without hammering the point stridently or pandering to fear. It is the serene way to draw attention to certain market sectoral exuberances without spilling ones cocktail.

There is -- or must be -- a tradition of "trouble with..." covers which Economist editors may have always winked about in passing each other over the tops of the metal file cabinets in the beige hallways at Canary Warf. I specifically recall -- oh, sometime in the early 1990's -- a cover when Wall Street had had its big recovery in its long and continuing run. The cover photograph was of two camels copulating. The caption was..."The trouble with mergers".

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently estimated that
between 2003 and 2005 in the US, about 45 per cent of electronic
products were stored or reused, 11 per cent were recycled, and 44 per
cent entered the waste stream. These look poor figures in a country
where 100 per cent reuse or recycling could be possible.

They
look even worse when one considers that old systems are being shipped
to the developing world in great quantities for reuse. Here, disposal
infrastructure and policies are only in their infancy. Simon Mingay, a
Gartner analyst, says: “We’re exporting a big problem.”

My article in the Financial Times on Basketball & technology ran this week...

"You know the IT is getting good when you stop noticing it -- like a good referee. Systems used by basketball are disappearing behind the hot dog stand and up into the rafters.

As content, basketball is highly attractive to distribution interests
because it’s so compelling to viewers. Asked if content is really king,
Mr Cuban says: “When distribution is in place, it’s the defining
element. Without distribution, it’s not.”

There's also a timely and worthwhile Editor's Note from DB Editor, Peter Whitehead, on the paperless office and the cost structure of the newspaper business. (Timely because some notable newspapers are having a hard time -- as portrayed in the great PBS series on Frontline, "News War", that I pointed to last night.)

FT's Richard Waters sums up the Microsoft ISO contradiction situation with a crisp economy on the FT Tech Blog...

...it is at the least inconvenient for Redmond, and potentially more worrying, that the International Standards Organisation has just added another three months to its review of the matter, following representations from the UK (and possibly other countries.)

A perceptive comment to the post gets right to the heart of the matter...

Given that MicroSoft needs the "standard" label to get contracts, but
doesn't actually want interoperability (which would increase
competition and drive down prices), it shouldn't come as a surprise
that they're encountering resistance from the standards bodies. I would
expect them to create the worst possible standard they can get away
with. It's the rational thing to do, and the people who run Microsoft
are very skilled.

Reviewing my notes this morning from yesterday's meeting with officials at the NBA, I had to pick my jaw up off the desk.Attending:David Stern, CommissionerAdam Silver, Deputy CommissionerSteve Hellmuth, Senior VP Operations & Technology
Mike Bass, Head of Public Relations

Apparently people don't ask too often how the NBA uses technology in the context of its business.

I asked the room, addressing no one in particular --

"What business are you in? Is this a media business? Is this an information business?"

Adam Silver later added some interesting observations about the unusual number of technology entreprenuers who own basketball franchises. It's surely no accident...and I'm going to explore a few possible answers.

Technology & sport are intimates, but basketball by its nature is a special technology puller. What suprised me when access opened up was the extent to which basketball exemplifies the globalizing business.

The FT will be covering in February three sports and their involvement with technology.

So, I joined the august company of editors, writers & freelancers from around the world with wise-guy comments about the year in technology and what might be ahead.

Social media was mentioned quite a lot, as was YouTube. Microsoft's leadership transition got play, and the Internet Governance Forum ("IGF") -- for which our friends from Yale and in Washington DC, Laura Denardis, Jamie Love and Manon Ress, travelled to Athens this Fall -- was mentioned. ICT security and terrorism's effects on travel were also on people's minds.

It was a really good issue of DB on the whole. Too bad you may have missed it. Get a subscription to the funny pink paper! DB Editor, Peter Whitehead, has fallen for Second Life. Coverage will be deep...in the new year.